Read on the next two pages for a run down of the ten Halloween happenings with the sweetest treats and most musical trickery in 2014, photos and video included. Did you witness any of these sets? Did you see a great performance that was left off this list? Sound off in the comments below.

That the band owns The Womb allowed a level of environment control musicians rarely have and a concert experience defined by the music as much as the space itself and the scene it set. Not a sports arena or music venue per se, but rather an “art space” in the most outlandish sense of the term, The Womb is as trippy as the jams. The bar is an homage to A Clockwork Orange, there’s a giant “King’s Head,” a claw machine with skulls and other assorted prizes, all sorts of blobs and whatnot draped from the ceiling and all around, psychedelic lighting (understatement), and true to its name, vagina doorways to birth all who enter. This is not a place to merely hear music; this is a space to be reborn (or something like that). Even the bathrooms are part of the experience. Which isn’t to suggest the music didn’t deliver. Just the opposite: Steven Drozd and Wayne Coyne’s spin-off group The Electric Würms continued the Lips’ tradition of tricks and treats in ways their best known band perhaps no longer can three-plus-decade into their career.

Whereas The Flaming Lips began last year’s Blood Bath with John Carpenter’s “Halloween” movie theme, The Electric Würms opened this year’s Freak Out with The Carpenters’ “Superstar.” Well, technically it’s a Delaney and Bonnie song, but as with Sonic Youth’s immortalized cover, Karen and Richard’s version is clearly the canvas the Würms repainted. Although Drozd has has long admired The Carpenters (evident in his copping of their use of major sevenths and ninths in the harmonies of Lips originals), nobody would’ve guessed the Würms would start with this slice of seminal ’70s soft-pop segued into their own “Living.” “[Steven and Wayne] just sent us a little clip of them messing with [“Superstar’] and said they wanted to do it over the ‘Living’ beat,” Würm Charlee Cook recalls to The Future Heart. “So we did it and I absolutely love that song.”

“Nothing surprises me anymore,” says Cook. “It’s always something I would never think of and always ends up great.” Thankfully for those not in attendance Daniel Huffman – better known as New Fumes and one half of Birdflower, and a major contributor to the Würms’ record – captured the entire performance in all its bliss:

Superstar (The Carpenter cover) >
Living
I Could Only See Clouds
The Bat
Transform
Fixing a Hole (The Beatles cover)
Heart of Sunrise (Yes cover) (with a snippet of John Carpenter’s Halloween movie theme)